9/11 Tribute - Part IV

On Sept. 11, 2001, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in Manhattan. A third hurled into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. But a fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark, N. J., to San Francisco, never made it to the hijackers' destination.

The 40 passengers and crew members realized their flight had been hijacked, and from air phones they learned about the attacks on the other sites. According to accounts from the phone conversations, the group took a vote and vowed to take back their plane, which crashed into a field in a remote, rural area near Shanksville, Pa., never to reach its possible target, the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. -- only 20 minutes flying time from the crash site.

In 2005, relatives of those who died on Flight 93 helped select Paul Murdoch's winning design for a memorial out of some 1,000 entries. The remote area proved a challenge. It is a former coal-mining site that required major soil and water cleanup. There also were landowner conflicts and a controversy over a crescent in the design that some took to be a Muslim symbol in the original plan.

To quiet debate, the design was altered from the original crescent shape, and the project eventually will feature a 93-foot-high Tower of Voices containing 40 wind chimes -- one for each passenger and crew member who died -- and 40 groves of red maple trees that will line a circular walkway that follows the natural bowl shape of the land, a result of the surface mining.

The $62 million plan includes 2,200 acres. Visitors can follow the flight path, and in phase one, they will view a slab of white marble inscribed with the names of the 40 victims. A concrete structure will form a gateway for visitors, separating the parking area and the memorial plaza, which extends along the edge of the crash site.

Continue on to the rest of Yahoo's article, and be sure to click the link that takes you to the photo gallery of the memorial (it looks like the pic above).

Or to skip the article, and go straight to the photos, click here..

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